


What's An Apology, When One Is Umble?

by elviaprose



Category: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 08:52:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14951505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose
Summary: Uriah Heep has returned from Australia, having secured a pardon from the Crown. To David's great alarm and outrage, Uriah has been visiting each of David's friends in turn and making elaborate apologies, which they all seem to be accepting. Surely nothing good can come of this!





	What's An Apology, When One Is Umble?

**Author's Note:**

> This fic would be literally half what it is without x_los's beta

“Mister Copperfield! Good day to you!” Uriah Heep gasped with what seemed to David to be alarm. He writhed horribly, his hand pressing his heart. Before David could say a word, Uriah had slipped past David and hurried into the street of Cloisterham. David would have followed and demanded to know what he was doing in England in general and on Agnes’s doorstep in particular, only he was in such a state of shock at seeing the man. Agnes’s cheerful-faced maid had shown David into her parlor before he had gained enough presence of mind to hare off in pursuit.

“Why was Uriah Heep in your house?” David asked, after Agnes had given him a sisterly embrace. He looked at her carefully. She no longer so closely resembled her mother’s portrait--now she was lovelier, lovelier for being happier. After she had married Mister Wickfield, Agnes’s mother had had no love in her life except that of her new husband. Agnes’s grandfather had considered his daughter’s marriage to be a great betrayal and a great shame, and the unfortunate woman’s friends had not stuck by her. Agnes, in contrast, was cherished by her father and her friends alike, and Wickfield had made peace with his own sadder history, and no longer distressed her so much with his suffering. Agnes’s eyes were still grave, but her face had become very round and very rosy with the warmth and comfort of her married life. She had three children now with a boyish vicar with a great deal of hair on his head and dimples in his cheeks. David disliked Cloisterham, finding it stale, cold and small, but when he was in Agnes’s home he nearly forgot his antipathy for the place.

Five years ago David had decided he loved Agnes after all and wanted to marry her if she would have him. Yet something had kept him back from telling her so--some hesitation had stayed his tongue, every time he considered it. It was nothing he could identify--it was not fear that she would refuse him. He had questioned himself on that matter and was certain of that much, and yet he had put it off until Agnes had found someone else entirely to love. One day she had said gently, “Trotwood, somebody is going to be married.” He had remembered how, years before, she had said nearly just those words to him when Miss Larkins had been about to marry, and how he had said, “not you, Agnes?” 

Playing his part with solemn humor, he had asked the question again, and this time it had indeed been Agnes who was to marry. She introduced him to the vicar, who had seen her in the street and loved her from that moment. David had not been sorry. He had felt a strange, painful tenderness in his heart, a wistfulness, a happiness, and he had cried, embracing her and telling her he was very glad, until they had both laughed at him. Agnes, David knew, deserved to be loved and married unhesitatingly. And perhaps he, too, deserved a wife he would not hesitate to love. Agnes was not the sort of person to long for a husband who would have suffered her marriage to another like a hammer’s blow. Yet David knew himself to be capable of such passions, and came to think that it would not have been right to marry anyone he would not feel such sentiments for. He recalled Dora saying that they ought to have loved each other as girl and boy, and not as man and woman. He wondered if this love, too, was not best left just as it had been when he had cherished it most: warm, loyal, friendly, and entirely chaste. 

David had not fallen in love with anyone else after that. It ought to have been strange to him, for his heart had been so easily smitten when he was young, and yet most days he hardly thought of the matter. His was not an empty heart. It was filled with any number of passions on any given day of the week: elation if a book was going well; despondency if it was going poorly; the love of battle, for he was always fighting someone, whether publisher or parliamentarian; enjoyment of his good friends, for he had the best friends in the world. These friends of his were not the busy-body sort to observe that he was a handsome, charming, and now quite well-to-do widower who was exceedingly eligible for marriage, and so he thought of it rarely, and seldom wondered at his own disinterest. 

But on this particular day, when David looked into Agnes’s dear, familiar face, he saw something other than the signs of her long happiness. “Agnes, you’ve been crying! They’ll have to hang me for murder, what’s he done?” David cried.

“Oh, Trotwood,” Agnes laughed. “You must not worry. Mister Heep came to offer an apology to me.”

David gave an angry laugh. “Which you did not accept!”

“Which I did accept,” she corrected mildly. “I believe it was truly felt, and honestly sought. How seldom you doubt my judgment, and yet I can see that you do today.” She had a smile in her voice and eyes.

“Fiddlestick!” David said. “You are good and kind as ever, my dear Agnes, and so you have been good and kind to him. But he, too, is just the same as he ever was---”

Here Agnes tried to stem the flow of ungenerous words she knew would come, but David would not be stopped.

“A cur fit to put the hound of Hades out of work! An eel not fit for a costermonger’s cart. I would have known him to be as brim full of evil as ever without setting eyes on the old devil, but I have seen him, as he was going out.” David found he was perspiring a good deal in his agitation, and removed the handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his flushed brow. He was a slight man, and his long walks through and beyond London kept him uncommonly trim, but in his middle years his temper made him mop his brow as often as a man of twice his bulk. 

Agnes merely smiled.

“I have seen him at greater length today, and have known him since he was a child. Perhaps,” and here her eyes became a little more merry than was their habit, as they always did when she teased him, “I know him better--”

“Oh, I don’t think--” David began furiously, but stopped himself, quite surprised at the sudden lash of anger this provoked in him, but sensing, through experience, that he was about to become unjust indeed if he did not swallow his words.

“He moved me with his honesty, Trotwood,” Agnes said firmly. “The tears you have seen came because he spoke plainly of that time, and made me think of the difference in my happiness now and then. He did not make himself abject, as his habit had been. He admitted freely that he had never appreciated my virtues, and did not and could not do so now. That much you also know is true. You and I always knew that was so. And then he told me he regretted the pain he caused in frightening me with a loveless marriage to a man I would never be able to regard, and that he was sorry for making me his instrument, for he used me to cause pain to you and to father. He knew, he said, that it had been a far worse burden to me than the prospect of any suffering I would endure myself. I saw that he knew my heart, and his own, and looked on the matter unflinchingly. I told him I did forgive him--”

“You didn’t!” David cried, knowing very well that she had.

“I did. And when I told him so, he smiled. I had never seen him smile in that way before--it is quite a surprising sight, and it was that, more than anything, that made me believe he was sincere. It was so entirely different from anything I had ever known him to do.”

“Nonsense--he’s a crocodile,” David said. “I don’t doubt he’ll be visiting again, and with an evil purpose. He’ll wedge himself in and then take vengeance on us. He said he would! You have not forgotten, I am sure. For setting him down--when he deserved it! At least you are safely married now.”

Agnes hugged him. “It will be all right. I am not afraid of him, but if he comes again, I will be on my guard. Why don’t I bring the children in, and you can set up the paper theater and work on your play?”

David did not take well to Agnes soothing and smoothing him, as he called it within his own mind. If he had been her husband, and if he had not found Agnes impossible to have it out with in a satisfying manner, they would have had a quarrel over it. As it was, he allowed her to prevail.

In the presence of Agnes’s children, he was able nearly to forget the matter. He played a bit more vigorously than usual, tired them out quite thoroughly, and then ate his tea with a strange abstracted hunger. 

He left that evening, and felt worry settle on his heart like a mangy dog curling itself up heavily for a kicking, yipping sleep. He not only found himself steeped in rightful anxiety regarding Uriah’s plans, but also found himself brooding on a less worthy matter: Agnes’s remark that she had known Uriah longer, and perhaps knew him better than David did. It pricked at him more than it ought. He had never considered his knowledge of Uriah to be a point of personal pride. He did not even firmly consider himself to be the hero of his own life--to believe himself to be the person to know Uriah best was to claim a sort of pride of place in another man’s life, and was in all ways quite ludicrous. And yet hadn’t Uriah shown more of himself to David than to anyone else? Had he not confided in him, in his own evil way, and made David his unwilling accomplice time and again? And had Uriah not admitted himself that he had used Agnes’s suffering as a weapon against David, and had therefore considered David to be more his enemy than the others were? It was always so vexingly difficult, with Uriah, to know if he had gone wrong in his thinking. 

**

Uriah did not return to Agnes, but he did visit Mister Wickfield, and the Strongs, and Aunt Betsey. David had himself payed special visits to each of them for the express purpose of warning them against Uriah, always arriving just too late. 

Doctor Strong reported that Uriah had helped him industriously for a week with his dictionary, in penance for the grief he’d caused with his slander against Annie. He had never had such useful help in his work--never in his life, he told David with enthusiasm. His cloudy eyes did not express much, in their extreme age, but his smile told of his happiness. When David had been less than happy himself to hear this news, Strong had attributed this to the wrong cause entirely. “Oh my dear boy, I had ungratefully forgotten your help to me, but you were simply invaluable as an assistant--simply invaluable,” he assured David, patting his arm repeatedly.

**

“I have accepted his repentance, Trot,” Aunt Betsey said briskly. “For he seemed sincere, and I believe the heart may soften with time, and overcome the hurts that have made it cruel. I was never as _he_ was, but I understand that as well as anyone. That is not to say that you must, of course. If you never see him again, I won’t bat an eye. Not an eye.” 

Wickfield informed David that if his daughter, ever possessed of ten times his insight, saw no motive but an honest one, he would not go against her. 

David heard all of this with great outrage. He found that each of his friends, in their own fashion, had robbed him of the heart to try to argue them out of their forgiveness, but this did not put him in a more forgiving mood himself. He wondered if Uriah would come to him--he had, after all, not come yet. David had, perhaps, been less directly wronged than anyone, and yet he knew Uriah had worked tirelessly against him. He had done his utmost, which was considerable, to thwart him in love, to dim his prospects and put him into poverty, to make him not only a witness to Agnes’s distress but an unwitting accomplice in the suffering of Doctor Strong. If Uriah were capable of sincere repentance, which he surely was not, surely he would have had much to repent of in David’s case. He could well imagine that Uriah would not dare come to him--Uriah perhaps knew David well enough to know he hadn’t a prayer of forgiveness from that quarter. Perhaps, David thought, with a little shame, Uriah might even, with supporting precedent that did David every discredit, fear bodily harm from David, if he dared too far. 

** 

Weeks passed. David saw Uriah Heep at the corner of his eye everywhere he went. But when he turned again it was always some other shorter, stockier, less violently red-headed person. He could not concentrate on his writing. He dutifully sat at his desk and labored over it until two o’clock each day, but the effort left him sapped and miserable. The part of his soul that ordinarily hungered and dreamed and worried for his creations was all wrapped up in Uriah Heep. David tried to lose himself wandering London, going out twice as often as usual. He had found he loved to let his feet take him to interesting nooks and corners, streets that ended in battered stone walls. He loved the challenge of keeping his bearings. It made him feel himself an explorer--and what secrets he found, in London’s streets!--dirty, tumbledown secrets, but no less wonderful for that. And the streets were seldom empty. David loved watching people, large nosed and small, thin and fat--engaging his mind in observing the rhythms of their speech and gesture, testing the pitch of their existence, trying to understand what note they would sound, if it were a symphony they were a part of--what they ought to chime with and against, what their way of living might mean in the scheme of it all. It was a question without an answer, but yet with a thousand answers, which he might forge in his private thoughts and in his stories. 

But in all his life, he had never considered anyone with half the fascination with which he had considered Uriah Heep. His gestures and speech had always seemed the most striking of anyone’s. In David’s youth, his feelings upon looking at Uriah had been singular--attraction and repulsion at once, which he found more irresistible to the eye than anything beautiful. Uriah’s rightful place in the bustling world had in recent years seemed to David the hardest to make anything sensible out of, and that made it difficult to set aside. With thoughts of Uriah so present in his mind, the act of looking itself came to remind David of the man, to make him all the more inescapable. 

David began to believe that Uriah truly would not come. He determined not to feel it as a reproach, or a disappointment. He had never been able to decide quite what he thought of Uriah, and it seemed he still could not, even when the question ought to have been settled irrevocably. He often lay awake, wondering if it could be true that Uriah wanted the forgiveness of all those he had wronged. If Uriah had suffered greatly, and repented. It would be easier if he had not. It would be easier to bear thinking of Uriah, if it did not mean feeling a pity David did not wish to feel. David had long taken an interest in England’s treatment of her criminals. He had come to think transportation a cruel punishment, and one often imposed on those who did not deserve a sentence at all. He had watched men and women returning often, and once had seen a mother and her grown son embracing, clinging together--he was stooped and she was raggedly poor, having suffered in his absence with no one to care for her. David had nearly been ill with distress, dizzy with the unbearable thought that such a thing could have happened to the pair. Try as he might to keep it from his mind, a guilty memory of Uriah had come to him with that sight. And for all that suffering, on the whole transportation resulted only in greater criminality and meanness. So many he had spoken to had told him stories of men and women they had known who had fallen deeper and still deeper into crime as a result.

Then, on the twentieth of February at three o’clock in the afternoon, David’s maid, Anne, came in to tell him that a Mister Uriah Heep was calling to see him. 

“Tell him I’m not at home,” David said. Anne looked at him expectantly. If it was a caller Anne had not seen before, David always asked her impression of the person. She would describe them as she saw them, and David would wait eagerly to see just how his own sight of the person would disrupt the vision he had sketched for him. She was clever, and had seen a deal of the world, and in general saw matters rather differently than he did. David generally felt he was a sharper observer if he heard first what someone else made of a person. And he sometimes found what she did and did not say of a person quite amusing. There had been a time when she hadn’t thought it fit to mention that a gentleman was wearing a hat that seemed to be over two feet high. Lord, he’s doused himself in scent like he’s both goose and gander! she had told him instead. How wonderful, that he had anointed himself so thoroughly as to make a two foot hat a passing detail! 

In this case, however, much as he wanted to know what Anne made of Uriah, he resolved not to ask. He pushed down that curiosity, as well as curiosity regarding Uriah’s purpose. He hated to admit that he felt a touch of relief that Uriah had come to him. He was glad to be called on, if only because it would stop him tossing and turning and churning over why Uriah had not done it yet, and if he would. He felt nearly excited that he had come, glad to be involved in the matter directly at last. This eagerness, he thought, did not become him. At any rate, it gave him some power over Uriah’s plans. If whatever it was Uriah was plotting required his seeing David, he could thwart Uriah simply by refusing.

Anne returned to David with the message that Uriah would call again tomorrow. Over the course of a week, Uriah came again and again. Late and early he came, with incredible faithfulness. Remarkably, Uriah knew not to come during David’s writing hours, during which he truly never did take visitors. Perhaps even more remarkably still, given David’s busy life, he came only once when David was indeed out on business. David strongly suspected that each day, Anne was traitorously telling Uriah when Mister Copperfield might well be in the following day, upon Uriah’s ingratiating request. This was disloyalty indeed, David thought, but he also thought it would be beneath him to rebuke her, when she was doing no more than she would have done for any visitor. That was always the way with Uriah. He was always precisely as faultless as it suited him to be. And what difference did it make, if David was in or out, if he was not going to see Uriah regardless? 

On the one day that Uriah did not come at all, David wondered if perhaps Uriah had at last given it up. Uriah’s absence that day left David in more turbulent spirits than usual. He ought to have worried that this meant that Uriah had some new and even more damaging scheme in mind, but he found he could hardly work himself up to it. As he had learned more of the details of Uriah’s fraud against the bank of England, David had come to believe that he could never overestimate Uriah’s capacity for diabolically clever and patient scheming. Uriah had already, David knew, exerted both his patience and his intellect a great deal for this particular plan. It was not anyone who could have returned so far into the good opinion of such a diverse lot of people as Uriah had wronged. But David instead, more than anything, felt a strange sense of loss and error settling on him. He took great pains to disguise this distress from Anne, afraid she would guess that it was Uriah’s absence that was putting him off his stride and that she would secretly laugh at him for it. He knew she had already marked how much Uriah’s calls put him out of his accustomed affability, and was wondering at it. But the next day, Uriah returned.

“Mister Heep tells me to inform you he was sorry he could not come yesterday. He had to pay a visit to his mother, you see,” she told him.

“He tells me to promise you he will come faithfully for ten years or more if that is what it takes, for he would like to make an apology to you,” Anne said. “He seems--”

“Very sincere!” David cut in with theatrical exasperation. “Yes, that is what everybody says,” he added, furiously tamping down any other emotion he might have felt, as if it had leapt smouldering out of the fire and onto his carpet, and required grinding out beneath his boot. 

**

David continued to turn Uriah away. Uriah would say simply that he had called, and on these occasions he might pass on one simple message to Mister Copperfield. Congratulations on David’s latest number of his current novel (which David felt he had only just managed to scrape out, in his disrupted state of mind. If he had had any doubt that Uriah had only pretended to have read it, it would have been settled by how absolutely undeserving of congratulations this poor effort was) or, on David’s thirty-fifth birthday, which fell on the tenth of March, his best wishes. 

David’s heart was not stone, but he nearly managed to persuade himself that whether he received Uriah or not was hardly a matter of the heart at all--if Uriah felt anything, it was only bitter hate and vengeance, and so David had no need to feel he was being hard in turning him away. He might have gotten by thinking so for a long time had he not met Uriah in the street. 

“Master Copperfield!” Uriah had cried, hurrying towards him. It took him so much by surprise, and Uriah seemed so little changed from how David remembered, and it was so precisely the same sort of greeting he had always received from Uriah in his youth in Canterbury that for an instant David felt a dizzy confusion of time and place such has he had never recalled feeling before. He hardly knew where he was.The next moment found David wondering what to do. 

In the end, he had looked at Uriah with every ounce of puzzlement he could muster. “I’m sorry,” he had said, “I don’t believe we’re acquainted.” 

He stared Uriah down directly, and to his surprise Uriah had hurried away from him, ducking into the nearest alley. Drawn to Uriah in spite of himself David had followed, wondering what Uriah would do next, and where he might be going. 

He had found Uriah seated on the nearest stoop. One hand clutched the door lintel, as if he had used it to help himself down, and then forgotten he clutched it. The other covered his face. It was a posture of such undisguised distress as David had never seen from him. Even when Uriah had been driven from Wickfield’s house, with all his sins exposed, there had been a sullen defiance about him. Could David have caused so much feeling in Uriah as this? David could not quite bring himself to believe it--it seemed to David too flattering to his sense of his own importance and too frightening to believe himself to have such power. And yet whether he chose to believe it or not, the sight stayed in his mind.

**

“Traddles,” David said, having called on his old friend. “Have you heard anything about what Uriah Heep is doing these days?”

“Special pleading,” Traddles said.

David laughed, assuming this to be a joke. In fact, it was not one.

“I believe he’s doing quite well for himself at it. He came back to England with a reputation in certain circles for his abilities. I believe he secured his pardon by helping several of the right people come out on top of their legal troubles--inheritances, profit-share disputes and the like, you know the sort of thing. He’s not a lawyer any longer, of course, but special pleading requires no qualifications at all except an iron-clad knowledge of the practice of the law. He’s enormously suited to it, and earning comfortably enough to really annoy some people. But it’s a common, and in my opinion, an unbecoming gripe among lawyers that a man who hasn’t been called to the bar often out earns a man who has.” 

So Uriah had been disbarred when he’d been sentenced. David hadn’t thought of that, but of course he must have been. Good, David thought, trying to harden his heart. As Uriah should have been, indeed. And he was apparently still doing better for himself than he deserved to be. But David could not help feeling an ache in his heart, to think of what it had taken for Uriah to become a proper lawyer, and that he was not one any longer.

“He hasn’t been to see _you_ has he?” David asked. He had assumed he was merely asking Traddles to repeat the gossip of the profession surrounding Uriah, and yet there was something in Traddles’ manner that spoke of direct knowledge.

Traddles looked abashed, which David took for an answer. Why had Uriah called on him? Had Traddles become Uriah’s enemy when he had assisted in expelling Uriah from Wickfield’s house? Was he now also an object of Uriah’s revenge? Or perhaps, if Uriah’s object really _were_ to repair his reputation in the eyes of the world--and David had to consider that it might be true--Traddles was significant to Uriah in that respect. Traddles had, after all, been a chief witness of Uriah’s villainy, and had come out very strongly against it. Perhaps Uriah still felt that sting and wished to ease it. 

“We’ve had him to dinner once or twice,” Traddles admitted, putting his hands through his hair so that it stood up comically.

“Traddles!” David cried furiously. That Traddles had done more than merely admit Uriah when he had called, David had not expected. He felt it to be something in the way of a betrayal.

Traddles looked so forlorn that David felt quite guilty. David’s power to cause such distress in Traddles struck him powerfully. Traddles was nearing forty. He would soon, if the legal gossip proved true (David had kept up a membership in several law societies, despite success in his career as a writer, out of curiosity and a sense that the connections might at some time be useful or even necessary to him), be made a judge. And yet, because Traddles was bashful and meant well to all, and because he cared for David’s good opinion in particular, David had the power to make him once again the hapless, roly-poly schoolboy David had first known. 

In the case of Traddles, recognizing that power sparked only wonder, but these musings uncomfortably recalled to him the aspect of his encounter with Uriah that he had been most striving to forget. He had long, in some secret corner of his heart, wanted to have terrible, fearful power over Uriah--and not, he knew, out of the innocent desire for the resources to protect himself and his friends. When Uriah had set blazes of light and shocks of horror through David the night that David had given him coffee in his apartment, there had been some part of David that had not only wanted to choke the life out of Uriah in fury but that had desperately--terrifyingly--wanted their positions vengefully reversed. Knowing all David did of Uriah, it had always seemed laughably unlikely that this fearful, shameful impulse to set Uriah hot, cold, and weeping simply with his words would ever be fulfilled. And then there was some part of David, a younger, still more deeply buried part of him, that simply wanted Uriah to feel so much for him because he wanted Uriah to like him. David had thought that part of himself was gone forever. 

“I _am_ sorry, Traddles--you should do as you please, and not worry about sour old Copperfield. I still have the ancient grudge, but I have always liked you for how readily you forgive and forget, as much as for all your other many virtues. And for all that you are always ready to laugh fondly over Creakle, you have never in your life failed to know evil when it was before you. You and Agnes are alike in possessing that fine quality.”

But though this was certainly true, David felt himself too overpowered by his history with Uriah to make himself believe that Uriah meant no ill at all. David was aware that he was, for good or ill, struck far more strongly than Agnes and Traddles were by impressions of people. David had always been more caught up in the currents and eddies of their moods, more sensitive to their slights, more affected by their energies (either attracted or repelled), hungrier for their affection. It made it more difficult to know precisely the right thing to do, when the feeling of being in the presence of a Creakle or a Steerforth was so strong--something beyond good or bad. A sweeping tide. Traddles and Agnes had less of that difficulty. And once such a feeling struck David powerfully, it never entirely seemed to leave him. He might set it aside for a while, but he would never remember his early schooldays without feeling again the sickened fear, the frightened laughter that had always been just under his breastbone when he had been in Creakle’s school. And so to chuckle fondly over those days, as though he was no longer that boy anymore--it was quite a difficult thing for him. He was that boy still, when he recalled being that boy. And thus he was that young man still who had dreamed all night of driving a poker straight through Uriah’s body, and dreamed it so violently that he had feared he’d really done it. 

David felt that in obtaining the forgiveness of all of David’s acquaintance, Uriah had robbed him--robbed him of his rightness, of his sureness that he ought to hate Uriah, that he had as much right to hate Uriah as he had to hate the other great villain of his life, Edward Murdstone. He had always hated Uriah on the behalf of others--if they forgave the man, where did it leave him? If they saw good in him, and hope in him, and perhaps even thought Uriah had been wronged in his own part (No one had said so much, but it was a thought David himself had had difficulty suppressing in his own mind), his anger threatened to become to him different thing: a stubborn ghost of a youthful hatred, rather than an honest grievance. 

**

It was March Fifteenth. The date, being the infamous Ides of March, was a lucky one for schemers. 

“You may invite him in,” David told Anne, to her great surprise.

When she did so, David found himself afraid to look at Uriah, and let his eyes pass over him almost without seeing him.

David suggested that Uriah have a seat at one of the chairs around the small round table where David and any guests typically took their tea. Uriah thanked him profusely, as was his custom, and seated himself rigidly, his arms on the chair, and his legs all straight, sharp angles. The effect of adding his long limbs to those of the chair was rather to conjure a spider, but in this case, one that had just been doused with water, and was twitching in its damp distress. Uriah was sweating visibly. The table was small, and so they were quite near to one another when David took his own seat. David had not, until that instant, felt his parlor to be too intimately arranged.

He is in worse distress than I am, David told himself, to try to take heart. Though why Uriah should be in such a state, David could not imagine. 

“Oh, I am seated in David Copperfield’s parlor!” Uriah exclaimed with brittle effusion. David could not think why Uriah should persist in this sort of oil-soaked remark, when he knew David could put no store in it. David thought perhaps it had become something of a habit to Uriah, and served perhaps to settle Uriah’s nerves now. 

“Could you bring us some tea, Anne--or do you prefer coffee, Mr. Heep?” David asked mildly, all the while feeling like hot wool was wrapped tight around his lungs.

“Oh, I couldn’t insist on coffee,” Uriah said with a gasp.

“Coffee, please, Anne,” David said briskly. When she left, Uriah leaned forward eagerly.

“Well, and how _are_ we, Mister Copperfield?” he asked. 

It seemed more prudent to give a long reply than a short one, for every brief reply David gave seemed to wind the spring between them tighter. And so, with great effort at first, and then with less as he went on, he told Uriah a little of his work. 

Looking at Uriah closely, David could see little evidence of his sentence of hard labor. He looked to David largely unchanged--far less changed than David himself, who had grown a beard and who occasionally started to see himself in the mirror, hardly resembling, to his own eye, the boy he had been. If anything, Uriah looked more himself, and more the very image of a lawyer, than ever: his face, sharp and red-eyed, was more shrewd and clever and alive with schemes than ever, and now a pair of reading spectacles in his breast pocket caught the daylight and seemed to wink at all they had seen of the law and its vagaries. But there was something--Uriah seemed to relish his clothes, to wear them as though he was a little surprised at them. He had developed a habit of smoothing his right hand over his left sleeve, feeling the fabric under his hand over and over, as if to remind himself what clothes he wore. In spite of himself, it stabbed at David each time Uriah did it--stabbed David’s heart to see this evidence of Uriah’s pleasure at being returned to his former decent black. Whatever else might be said of Uriah Heep, it was true that he had suffered a good deal. How much of that suffering, David wondered, could he justly lay at Uriah’s own feet? And might it be said that he had paid enough for the evil he had done, after all?

Anne returned with their coffee, and David cut himself off, abruptly, in the midst of telling Uriah about the difficulties of releasing a weekly periodical. It was the sort of thing David was quite used to telling an acquaintance over a dinner, and he hardly had to think to do it. Uriah seemed to sense that David might have been saying anything, or nothing; though he was observing David with the greatest intensity, his attention did not seem to be on David’s words. It was uncomfortable, David thought, but to be expected--Uriah always knew precisely what he ought to notice.

“--but tell me why you’ve come,” he said, taking a sip from his cup. “Can it really be that you want my forgiveness?”

Uriah hesitated a moment. He did not pick up his own coffee. Instead he began scraping his chin, his long thumb rubbing over and over the jutting bones of his face.

“You’ll remember--of course you will,” Uriah began, “how I told you I hated you and had always hated you, and would pay you. But it isn’t true--first to last, it isn’t.” Uriah said this quietly and slowly, but with great emphasis. David could not recall another time when Uriah had seemed to be laboring to control his voice as he was now. Uriah wet his lips, which looked very stark against his white face. “I did hate you just then, but I didn’t always, and couldn’t long. I came very soon to want your forgiveness more than anything--don’t mock that,” he said almost frantically. “Don’t mock me for it. You will allow me to continue?” He asked, though David had not interrupted him. David assented, his own voice sounding a little weak to his ears. 

“The work was hard; my life was hard. At first, I was as angry and as black in my heart towards you as ever. But it couldn’t last. About a year into my sentence, I was struck ill.” Uriah’s body writhed a little in his chair, and he looked at David to see how he was taking these admissions. David, for his part, took pains to keep himself very still, and to betray as little as he could, feeling that now, more than ever, that he was on a knife’s edge with Uriah. Uriah’s brow creased a moment as David frustrated his attempts to judge whether he was making the impression he wanted, but this was not enough to make him falter, and he went on. “The fever was blazing hot--it’s a hot country, Australia, but no place is so hot as I was with that sickness, and I could ‘ardly draw a breath for coughing. I was filled--if I’d have been a glass it’d have been to bumpers--” here he jerked again, and his mouth stretched in a hard grin, “with regrets of the sharpest sort. Not for my actions--I didn’t repent ‘em, as won’t surprise you much. But I could think of nothing but that, only too likely, I’d never see you again. You were always a hot little ember in my breast, but when the fever took me I burned alive with thoughts of you. I would ‘ave done anything--anything, no sin would have been beneath me, to have you beside me, to see your face again. I swore to live, and swore that when I was well I would turn all of my efforts towards what I wanted--which was to be near to you once again, as I had been in your schooldays, and in your regard. I was already working my way towards a pardon--I won’t pretend that my great spite was not almost as powerful as my nobler motive--begging the pardon of my former partner for borrowing that old expression, when I have already presumed too much on im--” he put a wrinkle into each of his cheeks as he said this,“and it might have served as well in getting me back to England. But after I resolved to make things right with you, I worked like the very devil himself possessed me--though if you’ll permit me to say so, you didn’t leave room for even the devil in my heart.”

David reeled. Oh, dear Lord, he thought with fervor, and and only just barely swallowed the words before speaking them. David found he had removed his handkerchief from his pocket and was touching it to his face with an unsteady hand. It was a powerful account, one that could not but strike him with sympathy. Receiving affection where he did not expect to find it had always struck David’s heart sharply--he dreamed of it. He wrote of it often, and sometimes brought himself to tears doing it. He had at times in his life before this been surprised by loyalty, and kindness, but no one had ever made such a declaration to him as Uriah made now. It was like something out of a book. Could it really be true? Could Uriah really care for him so much as that? What had David ever been to him, but an upstart and a rival? David made an effort to compose himself. He filled his chest with air drawn from deep in his breast, and returned his handkerchief to his pocket.

“I don’t ask for any great regard--that I will have to earn with time,” he said. Ordinarily, if Uriah had told David of anything he was _not_ asking for, he would have writhed over it with excessive humbleness, and turned it into a joke against the world that tasted of honey and brown cod liver oil. But now he was still, his face like clay, his red eyes fixed burningly on David’s face. He did not wring his hands, but kept them wrapped whitely around the arms of his chair. Uriah’s fingers were so long, David noticed, that his thumb was able to touch his second knuckle, even though the curved wooden arm of chair was not very slender. “But I should like it so much if you to warmed towards me a little. I have missed your kindness, Mister Copperfield.”

This struck David as more than curious. 

“Have I ever been kind to you?” David asked bluntly.

“Oh heavens, so kind it nearly drove me out of my senses,” Uriah replied vehemently. David would have laughed if it were not for the expression on his face, which still seemed in deadly earnest. That Uriah could say something like that and mean it did not seem possible. And yet all of the evidence of David’s senses told him it was true. David found he was angry--angry because he longed to have been kind, and knew he never had been. 

“You can’t think it!” he said with force. “And where I tried to be kind, I never thought you liked it. You held my offer to teach you Latin against me for years! You made that much clear when you reminded me of it that night when we walked out together a while, and you told me of your philosophy of humbleness and how it had served you. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still makes you writhe like a fish on a hook to so much as think of it!”

Uriah answered back without a moment’s hesitation. “Ah, but that was only when you found yourself _trying_ to be kind--just as you have put it.” Uriah often spoke slowly, and with queer long pauses. David had a habit of falling into the belief that the speed of Uriah’s mind was rather slow, only to be lashed suddenly, as he was now, with a lightning quick reply. “Then you were only decent--which isn’t at all the same thing, is it, Copperfield? Where you had to make an effort, you couldn’t do it, but you were kind to me a thousand times without ever even noticing--naturally, as if you were born to do it. When you took my hand and guided me up the stairs--that was kind.”

David was struck with the way Uriah put this to him, as though the man had come to view this fleeting action as such an Event that it should need only the barest reference in order to conjure it in full. In fact, David found he scarcely forgotten a single time that he had touched Uriah, queer as the experience always was, and so did in fact know just the occasion to which Uriah referred. “When you offered me your bed that night I told you of my intentions towards Miss Agnes--you might as well have spit on me as made that offer. There wasn’t a spot of kindness in it. But when you made me as comfortable as you could before your fire, after I had refused--you didn’t even think not to do it. That was kind, wasn’t it?”

Uriah’s forehead, and the corners of his mouth, had creased hard as he spoke, and David found his own face was aching from frowning back. They had leaned toward each other, with Uriah so far forward he was nearly off his chair, and David’s hands braced on his knees. With some effort, David cleared his expression and leaned back. “You never thought not to come see me in my office and speak to me when you first came to Mr. Wickfield’s,” Uriah pursued. “You didn’t even think not to look at me like I was somebody that mattered, and to notice if somebody shoved me about. You would always notice. You always made such a proper _study_ of me, as no one else did, not even mother. You were kind to everybody, and don’t I know it. I always wished you’d be specially kind to me, and you weren’t. But what you did for me was meat and drink to me all the same, for the curious thing was, when you were kind to me I didn’t feel that I might have been anyone--not while you were doing it, at least, if you understand me.” Uriah gave a short, dry laugh that could almost have been taken for a cough.

David could take no pride in this sort of kindness, though he was not certain that was right--perhaps the kindness done so naturally, so natively, was the sort of kindness one might feel most satisfied with one’s self for possessing. He had come to value what he worked for, what he schooled his heart to do, not what his mind and body and soul did without his even knowing it. He sank into thought, at a loss for words, at the limits of his own understanding of himself.

“I did it for you,” Uriah said abruptly. “I made my peace with them for you. And I did it well. I know as well as the best of men what will be pleasing, and what will be a kindness, as I know what will be a bitter wound. I am sincere in what I spoke to them,” Uriah said. “Mister Copperfield--” and he said this name with such simple tenderness that it sent a shiver down David’s back. When Uriah had addressed him in his youth, his name had always been spoken at such a dramatic pitch that it had hardly sounded like a name at all--more exclamation or punctuation than direct address. Now, it was as though he spoke David’s name for the first time. “Mister Copperfield,” he said again, “I am sincere. If I had bullied them into tolerating me, would that have been sufficient to my purpose? There is no forgiveness from you without the forgiveness of your friends. I know that well. To touch their hearts, I had to know their hearts, and to know their hearts, I had to see em fully and consider em with care, and sympathy. I had to think why you loved em. I had to think how I could speak to each one head to head, equal to equal. No one knows better, I assure you Mister Copperfield, no one knows better than I how a person knows in their heart when they are not respected, even if the words are decent. I toiled over each way to make amends. I put my mind into their minds--I put my skill--and it’s umble, it ain’t much to yours, but I could just about do it--to thinking what it should be like to be a Dr. Strong or a Miss Agnes or a Mr. Wickfield, and I dreamed at night I was each of em and all of em. I practiced saying the words so they didn’t choke me, until it was almost easy. There’s a part of my heart that’ll always hate each and every one of them for looking down on me. And they do. I can’t help that, but I’ve learned a little how to be kind to them, hoping you’d see I had an ‘art you could forgive for being such a hard old thing as it is. For that’s all I want in the world.”

“Why?” David asked. “Why should you care what I think of what you’ve done? Why should you want to be my friend?”

“Why,” said Uriah, “because it is such a fine thing to be, Mister Copperfield. I wonder if you ‘ave ever known anybody who made your lot seem happier, just for being in their company. Somebody who, if you talked to them a while, you started to feel as if you’d taken too much to drink--it always made me reckless to the point of ruin to tell you confidences--perhaps you observed as much? For a long time I thought it would be easiest if I didn’t let you like me at all, because if you only liked me a little I would hate it worse than if you hated me completely--I liked you so well that I wanted a good deal more from you than I knew I should ever have, and though you may not think it,” here, for a moment, a little humor entered his eyes and twisted his mouth, “though I am quite a grasping sort of person, I don’t much care to grasp and starve for what I ain’t going to reach. I am sorry I was cruel to you--and I was. You never deserved it of me. Please forgive me for it, Copperfield. ”

David stopped him speaking more by leaning forward and taking his hands--it was the only way he could think to do it that did not involved shouting for him to stop. David could not have stood it another moment. Emotion of this sort from Uriah made him ache badly even as it pleased him, and to be appealed to so directly was simply too much for him.

Uriah looked down at their hands in surprise, his mouth opening a little. David felt a shock of passion go through him when he felt Uriah begin to tremble. It seemed impossibly cruel to let go, and so he tightened his grip instead. Still clasping David’s hands in his, Uriah slid to the floor so he was nearer to David--and on his sharp knees.

To David’s surprise, Uriah found it in himself to continue speaking, and he could not but be impressed at his courage. “It is hardest to ask your forgiveness, hardest of all, because I want it for itself alone--I found I could like giving the rest of em a little happiness, but it’s nothing to what it would be to weed the hate for me out of your heart. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for it now, you must see that’s true. You must see how I have worked and schemed for it, and umbled myself in truth. It was a bitter job but I’d have suffered much worse for this chance. I can be a diverting friend, a useful friend, if I exert myself. And I will--I am not without anything to offer you. Oh--” he grit his teeth and shut his eyes in seeming agony.

It was impossible, David thought, that this was a pretense. Although Uriah quite often wrapped layer upon layer of irony and truth about him until David couldn’t make him out, Uriah in his deepest sincerity was unmistakable for anything else. David’s very fingers, wrapped around Uriah’s hands as they were, twitched in response.

“I would trade anything I have if you’d just like me a little, as perhaps you once did--just enough to smile at me with real happiness. I don’t know what I’ll do if you can’t find it within yourself. Mister Copperfield--I beg you--”

David was certain he had never experienced a moment of greater intensity between himself and another living creature. No one had ever admitted to such a need for him. David had never felt so sure of the absolute honesty of such incredible and strange words. The whole of David’s wedding night was nothing to what passed between him and Uriah Heep in this single moment. He clung to Uriah’s hands desperately. 

And then the moment passed. It could not sustain itself at such a pitch. David’s understanding of the nature of the emotion between them seemed to slip from him even as he grasped for it. David felt his own body quiet a little, his heart slow. But still they did not let each other’s hands go, but rather remained, regarding each other, for a time that seemed both very long and very short.

***

It would be rather a long ride, even by mail coach, David told Uriah in a letter, and they would have to pass a night away from London, but there was somewhere David should like to bring him. Half a week had passed without a further meeting between them. Uriah had not called on him in the interim, but had instead sent to him by post, asking David when he should like him to visit. David had written back with the request they were now in the midst of fulfilling. David’s life had gone on as usual, and he had found himself a little less abstracted than he had been, although not entirely restored in spirits. 

Of necessity, the coach ride found Uriah’s skeleton of a frame pressed close to David’s. Uriah seemed a little wary as they exchanged the usual pleasantries, often looking side-long at David, but he also seemed filled with energetic purpose. He creased his face appreciatively in reply to nearly everything David said, and seemed, David thought, perhaps a little hopeful and happy, after his own hard fashion. David learned that Mrs. Heep never complained of anything now, she was so pleased to have him back. David remarked that he had no need to tell Uriah of his own friends and family, as Uriah had already paid visits to them all, but Uriah still insisted on making inquiries.

Uriah protested at first when David asked him to tell him of his work, saying that he wished to impress himself as favorably as possible on David, and that subject might not be to the purpose. The work was regrettably a little underhanded and not becoming of a gentleman--which he never claimed to be. But he swore it was nothing really wicked. David nevertheless insisted that he wanted to hear of it. And he did want to, for he found it still hurt him to think how Uriah had been set down in life, and it would be a balm to him to hear of Uriah being clever and sly and prosperous.

“Well, if you will insist on it,” Uriah had said, and David thought he seemed half to want to tell David after all. “But you must promise to recall that a man must earn his bread in some way or another, and I am not gifted, as you certainly are, Mr. Copperfield, and as such I am not able to put myself in the way of a profession that is beyond any reproach.”

“I think,” David said with dry humor, “that is too humbly put, Mr. Heep. I should say you are gifted indeed, but it is the unfortunate reality that those gifts put you in the way of some reproach.”

Uriah looked at him carefully, and then laughed, a real laugh, which David, seated close as he was, could feel shaking his shoulders. 

And so Uriah told David a little of the sort of work he had been doing in special pleading, which seemed mostly to consist of finding where somebody had neglected some small point of procedure and seizing on it to his client’s advantage. He had a dozen such stories, each of which he made quite entertaining for David, making dramas of the cases--sketching the characters and making a meal of how he’d seen his way to each victory. Traddles had been right, David thought, it was a good occupation for him.

David was surprised at how little silence there was between them. He recalled strange long halts in all of their previous conversations. They had perhaps always been too cautious of each other to speak freely. Yet now there always seemed to be another question to ask, or another remark to make. You must tell me more of yourself, Uriah said, again and again. And so David told Uriah a little of his daily habits. When he mentioned his little notebook where he jotted down bits of ideas and conversation, Uriah tentatively asked if he might see it, if David had it with him. David knew he might easily claim to have left it at home, but he found himself rashly removing it from his pocket. Uriah rewarded him by taking great interest in it, turning its pages carefully and exclaiming over the little scraps he found there. “This one you’ve already used, I think, but you improved upon it a little in the book, didn’t you?” Uriah said. David was astounded at this, and Uriah protested that he should not be so surprised: 

“Didn’t you believe I was sincere, when I sent my compliments on your latest? It needn’t strike like a lightning bolt to hear that I’m one of the many that love all you write, I should say,” Uriah said, sounding just a little sullen, and squeezing his hands together.

“But of course your subscription is not just one of many to me, Uriah,” David said briskly. “How could it be, given our history?”

Then they looked at each other, and David knew that the same thought had passed through both of their minds. How very like the young men that they had once been they each sounded. But now they could smile over it a little, where they never had been able to before.

Slowly the conversation grew more languid, yet it remained without heavy silences.

“It ain’t so bad to speak to me like this, is it now, Mister Copperfield?” Uriah said at last, looking at him hard.

David had not realized how fiercely Uriah had been striving, these past hours, to make David feel this point, until he said this.

“Not at all,” David said.

Uriah dropped back in his seat and let out a long sigh, his eyes closing. The next breath David himself drew was heavy with the emotion it kindled in him to see Uriah so relieved to hear it.

“That day we met in the street not long ago,” Uriah said, “I had not expected to see you. For just a moment I thought you really didn’t know me, but then I knew you did, for you never forget a thing, and you certainly remembered me well enough to turn me away from your door day upon day. You’d have an image of me in your mind if you were up to that, and I ‘aven’t altered much in my features, ‘umble as they are. I knew it was only that you despised me and wouldn’t so much as hear a word I spoke. I did not think then that I should ever hear you say such a thing as you said just now, and I thank you for it.”

“You needn’t thank me,” David said, feeling suddenly a little melancholy. “It would be taking a prejudiced view of the matter indeed to say that you have not been a fine companion these hours. It’s to my great discredit that I have held a number of prejudices against you these many years. There is much that I have done that needs forgiveness, too. I repent the times I did not let myself understand you. And I shall always bear the shame of having struck you that blow. Why, I heard you even had to have a tooth out!”

“Oh never mind that. That night you had me up to your old apartment, after that party, I had the most terrible toothache,” Uriah said confidentially, “and the well ‘eated coffee was the very devil for it. I was so pleased to be having your coffee that I had a second cup, but oh how I was ‘aving to sip at it! That blow of yours set that tooth hurting so as I had no choice but to have it taken right out. I shouldn’t have been free of the pain so soon, if it weren’t for you. And so that really was a kindness!”

Uriah spoke this like a dry, sly joke. Though Uriah’s eyes remained closed, and his body relaxed against the seat of the coach, he might as well have winked at David. This was, David thought, Uriah’s way of saying that he truly did forgive him for striking him. Though Uriah had never been merry, David supposed Uriah had always, in his way, been quite humorous. David had never before thought Uriah the least capable of using that gift to be good to him. 

David was musing on this when Uriah’s head dropped heavily against David’s shoulder. He had fallen asleep. David had yet to meet the man who did not nod off on a long coach ride, and though David could have sworn Uriah had once shaken a whole room by pressing his thumb down on the table, he was indeed a man. It was perfectly natural for him to sleep. Still, David thought, his head might have found somewhere else to rest. He sighed in annoyance, for holding still was bound to put a cramp into his neck, and he would not be able to sleep himself while they remained in this position. After he had shifted them so that they were as comfortable as they might be, however, he reflected that where the last time he had seen Uriah sleep he had found it horrible, now it did not seem so. Uriah grumbled and mumbled a little as he dozed, and David found he was almost smiling at it. 

It was an ordinary little inn where they stopped. Uriah had woken with a start before they reached it, and made many more apologies than David thought necessary, insisting that David should not have let him impose in that way. They ate their supper in the inn’s dining room. Uriah, he could see, was not entirely at his ease, not knowing David’s purpose for being there. Uriah liked to be the one to know all there was to be learned about a situation, David was aware, yet it seemed he was willing to wait for David to unfold his purpose.

When night fell, they still sat at the inn.

“Let us walk out a little under the stars,” David said.

As they walked, he took Uriah’s arm in his. He was reminded, as he did so, of their last walk together, when Uriah had asked him again and again to admit that David had never liked him as Uriah had liked David.

“I’ve brought you here,” David said, “because here my heart was the most open and yet also the most brim-full that it has ever been. I was so happy, and the worst times of my life were, every one of them, still to come. I stopped here with my nurse Peggotty the day she married her husband, and my baby-love and I shared kisses, and I nearly wept with all that was in my young heart. I thought that if there was any place where I might be kind to you in the easy way you wish for, it would be here, where that memory was close.” Even half a dozen hours earlier, in spite of all Uriah had confessed, David might not have felt he could tell Uriah so plainly what the place meant to him, but their carriage ride had warmed David to confiding in Uriah, and he did so with a readiness that surprised even himself.

Uriah jerked his arm out from under David’s. For a moment David was surprised and wondered if he had given offense, but then he knew he had done quite the opposite. Uriah’s hand was pressed against his heart, and his eyes were closed. At length he mastered himself, and put his arm again through David’s.

“Mister Copperfield,” he said. “You must not think I do not know what it is you ‘ave done for me tonight. You ‘ave exerted yourself considerably to find a way to be easy with me, just as I told you I wished you to be. You have labored so as you would not have to be labored about your kindness. Don’t think I am not grateful, that it does not touch my ‘art.” 

“You have done very much more in that line for my sake,” David said uncomfortably. They walked a few paces in silence. “You know,” he said, to lighten the mood, “when I was here last, when I was still a boy, I remember that I talked all kinds of nonsense about the stars.”

“I hope you will tell me all you can recall of it. What a great pleasure it would be to hear it!”

“You needn’t say that,” David said, laughing. “That seems to be going too far, and I doubt you quite mean it.”

“Oh, but it really would,” Uriah said with a dry chuckle. 

“I said that stars were diamonds that were as large as giants, and as round as apples, and as light as the air.” David admitted, trying to make this as humorous as he could.

“But why do they shine in the dark, then?” Uriah asked, scraping his chin with his free hand, as though this were a great mystery indeed.

“They catch the light of the sun inside of them and keep it and never let it go.”

“Ah,” Uriah said, tightening his arm and pulling David a little closer into him, “that’s very wise of em.”

“In fact,” David said, clearing his throat, suddenly a little nervous, “I have lately renewed my old interest in the stars. I have been reading a book on the subject by one John Nichol. There was one thing he said that struck me so much that I learned it by heart, as I do with any bit of writing that really captivates me.”

“Tell that to me too, if you would,” Uriah said. 

“Let’s see: ‘the usual inference from the aspects of the sky is that our skies are infinite, or that stars, as we see them, stretch through all space; which, critically examined, appears only a repetition of the old fallacy, that what is great to us must be great absolutely. That a system must be infinite merely because we cannot reckon up its magnitudes by the dimensions of our narrow abode.’ That’s what he writes,” David said. “I find it wonderful--the idea that the sky, which seems so vast to us, is as bounded as the city of London, or Epping forest, and that some being greater than ourselves might stride through it, and beyond it, to find something else entirely.”

“And why do you find that wonderful? You must tell me that, as well,” Uriah asked with what seemed to David quite genuine interest. David found it made him feel warm and alive, to be so interesting to Uriah. It made him feel worthy and made him want to excel himself. For however much Uriah had done that was evil, David truly believed that Uriah knew better, having suffered by it more than most, what was common folly, what seemed fair but was really foul. Considering it, David supposed, Uriah had always taken quite an interest in all he said. That interest had simply often been tinged with a kind of bitter malice, which was gone from him now. Uriah was still as vital as he had ever been and remained possessed of all of his old abilities and all his old anger at the injustices of the world, but it seemed Uriah had discovered that he might be the man he was and still enjoy David’s company.

“I suppose it makes the world seem very large and very small all at once, and that is a strange and indescribable sort of feeling--a bit like seeing an old friend where he is least expected. It makes the world we know seem to be huddled against something greater, and I feel a closer fellowship with everything in the world on account of it. There is something less lonely in thinking of it all that way.” David stopped, a little chagrined. He had not spoken this idea to anyone else. He had had no friend who had really seemed to be the right person to tell such thoughts to. Why it seemed right to tell Uriah, of all of his acquaintance, he did not know. They drew closer in the warm night, and Uriah sighed, and David found himself smiling a little too widely, and a little too long, feeling buoyant and wild.

“I could always listen to you speak morning and night, Copperfield. Do you know that? I’ll never tire of it,” Uriah said. It was not the words, but the expression on Uriah’s face when he said it that showed David what he had both always and never known. What he had nearly understood in full when Uriah had come to him for forgiveness, but turned from at the last instant. That Uriah’s interest in his company was not of the usual sort between men, but something far hotter and more passionate, something forbidden and secret, and that he had an answering need in himself for Uriah. He flushed hard in the darkness. It accounted for so much that had passed between them, so much that they had done to each other when they were young, and so much that had passed between them since Uriah had returned. David wondered how he could ever have believed that anything less could have spurred Uriah to such heights of bitterness and such desperate efforts for forgiveness. 

“I know, Uriah,” David said. He had not intended it, but the way the words left his mouth, it was entirely clear exactly what he knew. Uriah was no fool, and understood instantly.

“You know,” Uriah repeated after a moment, in a panicked whisper. “Oh lord, you know--I never thought you could think it.” He stumbled against David, gasping for breath. David had to grasp him around his waist to hold him up. 

“It’s all right,” David said, while all the time his heart pounded on and on, frantically. “It’s all right, I never would have said a word if I didn’t mean to do something about it.” This was not true--David had not been the master of his own words. But, David realised, he did want to act on his new knowledge. With resolution, he steered Uriah into the shadows of a wall and pressed their lips momentarily together.

David felt a galvanic shock of hunger go through him, stunning him with its force. He had never needed anything so much as he needed Uriah’s hands on him. He had never longed for any touch so fiercely. He looked about and saw they were alone in the shadows. It was late, and a quiet corner of a quiet place. He pressed them body to body, feeling Uriah sharp and warm and tall against him, feeling him bend himself closer. Uriah’s long lank hand grasped at the soft skin at David’s neck, and then stroked it. He looked up and Uriah’s mouth was open, twisted, in an expression like no expression he’d ever seen before on any man, and yet one he knew, even without reference, to speak of an absolute need--a need so sharp that it cut through them both at once. 

It was madness, but David could feel how hot and hard Uriah was beneath his decent black clothes, and he couldn’t wait a moment more to touch him more intimately.

“May I?” David asked, his hands on the fastenings of Uriah’s trousers. “It’s too reckless, but I must put my hands on you or go mad.”

“I would not refuse you to save my life,” Uriah said fervently.

Uriah’s skin was warm and soft and he writhed hard against David, biting off cries as David squeezed his cock.

David was surprised that Uriah did not ask if he could do the same in return, but simply did it, his cold hands quick and clutching. It was very unlike him, and David found he loved that Uriah had done it. Uriah’s hand felt so wonderful--he shuddered with the slight chill, and murmured Uriah’s name. 

He could feel Uriah’s breath hot and frantic, smell strongly the scent he wore--which, David noted with distant surprise, was a very fine and rich one, floral and full, very much to David’s own tastes. He breathed it deeply and, with one hand, tore off Uriah’s neckerchief and kissed the skin he’d made bare. Uriah grasped David’s shoulder bruisingly tight and went rigid, making soft choking noises, all the while never stopping stroking David. It was all together too sensual and powerful for David to endure another moment, and he whispered a soft “save me” into Uriah’s breast and reached the crisis of his own pleasure. Uriah followed him with a long, shaking groan. Then, without delay, Uriah prodded David into helping him make them both a little neater--enough that if they were found, they would not cause a scandal.

Even with that done, however, David still felt entirely bare before the world, his soul trembling with all he felt. “My heart forgot how to be dizzy with love,” David whispered, near tears, “for years and years.” 

“Can you really mean that it remembers now?” Uriah asked sharply, holding him very tightly. “I can hardly believe that I should be the one you loved like that. I did think perhaps I might tell you, someday, what I felt for you. But I thought it would be the work of years for you to love me, if you ever did.”

“Perhaps it was indeed the work of years,” David said. “Perhaps we have both been learning, all our lives, how it is we might love each other. For what I feel now is different than when I loved before. It is a feeling hotter and more burning, more desperate--and yet slow, too. Flame-bright and yet night-dark. Fully sounding of all of the chords of life.” His heart had not given itself up to another for so long, he realized, because it had ceased to be so easily beguiled and dazzled with charms that did not touch his soul to the quick, that did not challenge and change him. He had needed to learn how to open himself to those charms that did.

“I truly am fortunate beyond all of my hopes,” Uriah said quietly. Then he surprised David by grinning his hardest grin. “And how wonderful that sounds, Mister Copperfield, to feel such a thing as you describe.” His voice became a little sing-song. “I am an envious sort of person, by nature, and I think I should resent you very much indeed for having such a fine feeling as that. If not for one thing only. You see, I am prepared to swear on my life that I am as possessed of it as you, and as desperately in love as any man that ever lived. Even you, Copperfield. Even you.” 

He was still grinning when David kissed him again.


End file.
